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Verizon confirms plan to throttle the top 5% of LTE users during peak data usage

Verizon has introduced new Network Optimization guidelines to help ease network congestion. That’s a fancy way of saying that if you’re in the top five percent of LTE data users and you have an unlimited data plan on Verizon, expect to get throttled starting in October. But only for a little while.

t’s actually not as horrible as it sounds, at least according to Verizon’s post about the matter. The Network Optimization will only go into effect during the following scenario: If you’re in an area with high network demand and you’re one of the top five percent of data users with an unlimited data plan on the carrier’s mobile network. Once the congestion clears up, you’ll be back to whatever constitutes full speed LTE in your area.

Verizon says that the top five percent of users eat up 4.7GB of data each month as of March 2014. It also insists that slowing down the data speeds of those users is not literally throttling because the slow downs are only for a limited time and not for the rest of a billing cycle. Clearly someone needs to buy the company a dictionary.

Semantics aside, Verizon’s Network Optimization is far better than having your data speed throttled during the remainder of a billing cycle the way AT&T does.